Mid-pipe Attribute Changes

Hi All. I'm not sure if this is the best forum for this question, as I am dealing with sanitary sewers, but here goes:

Our sewer pipes are represented as polylines and manholes are points. The datasets are simple featureclasses in a geodatabase - they are not part of a linear network or have any other SDE-side relationships. Pipes are segmented as different features between manholes, if attributes change between manholes. We have new Asset Management software which treats the pipes as running contiguously between manholes; changes in attributes are represented as events, occurring a measured distance from a known point. I need to make our data work in and with our new Asset Management software.

In a nutshell, I need a solution which uses unsplit pipe geometry between manholes, while retaining the information where attributes change mid-line.

I have considered a linear network, however I have (at least) two requirements: 1 - that the attributes of each dataset are linked, so that changes to one are automatically represented in the other, and 2 - that thematic maps can be made showing different segments of each pipe differently - i.e. changes along the line are represented not as points, but as segments between pioints.

Will a Linear Network / Dynamic Segmentation accommodate this situation? Or can anyone suggest a solution otherwise??

Thanks!!Sean

Background (lengthy but may be helpful):Our sanitary sewers have a number of pipes that are well over 100 years old and in many places manholes are few and far between. Because of this, there are numerous places where the pipes have been spot-repaired and so critical attributes of the feature change between manholes. Also, our old brick sewers were built with vertical curves, so slope also regularly changes in between manholes. We need to know where such changes occur.

To represent changes in between manholes, we have split the pipe geometry where attributes change. To stick with our naming converntion (pipe are named for its upstream manhole), we have appended the unique ID of these segmented pipes with a ".1", ".2", etc. So this way each segment still has a unique ID while retainnig a sequential relationship with the pipes and manholes around it.

Recently our Sewer department has gone to the NASSCO PACP/MACP assessment and management standards, and is in the midst of integrating our GIS information into an Asset Management software which also works with these standards. These standards, and particularly this AM software, requires that a pipe segment is defined between manholes and is not split.

We are still using 9.31 but are right on the cusp of migrating to 10.1.

If we were to use Dynamic Segmentation (DynSeg) to address this problem, it is likely that we would move all of our attribute info into our DynSeg FC. Otherwise we'd have some attributes in the base geometry and some in the DynSeg FC.

these are by the definition seperate assets... so they should be treated like this accordingly..

so the creation of dummy assets is required. We use a flange fitting to split in this case or a "miscellaneous fitting". We have comonality using non key fields such as linecode and a common name for major assets such as outfalls and tunnels.